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Book Reviews

Mom, Incorporated

A Guide to Business + Baby

Aliza Sherman and Danielle Elliot Smith—two successful work-from-home mothers—have mapped out a comprehensive handbook that advises women on managing family while building a business from home. Mom, Incorporated: A Guide to Business + Baby, touches on every facet of doing it all well. Noting sleep as one of the biggest sacrifices made to both enterprises, their book maps out every step, from brainstorming a business to building a workspace to marketing tactics. Complete with helpful worksheets and checklists, readers will close this guidebook feeling motivated and confident that they can make it work.

Sherman and Smith detail the art of starting a business while nurturing a family in eight extensive chapters. The first emphasizes identifying personal strengths and passions and focusing a specific career on those powers. The authors share not only their own personal experiences and tips on business ventures, but those of other powerhouses as well. Here’s a smart tip from entrepreneur and business advisor Carol Roth: “One of the key differentiations is deciding if you are ‘me-centric’ or ‘customer-centric,’ or as they say, ‘jobbie’ versus ‘hobby.’” Another major benefit of this book is information about what not to do, learned from reading about others’ mistakes. Subsequent chapters provide the tools to plan a business budget, use the Internet to advantage, facilitate conversations and share information via social media marketing, build a business “A-Team,” understand legalities of running a business, meet capital needs, equip a workspace, shamelessly self-promote and much more.

Mom, Incorporated serves up a wealth of knowledge; not only does the book cover the broad strokes, it also zooms in on smaller details like securing a domain name and crunching numbers. Building a brand requires an immense amount of preparation, and another handy worksheet helps readers ask important brand-related questions of themselves. The authors each run different businesses and have endured a variety of obstacles along the way in building them. Their book includes an abundance of anecdotes detailing that experience. After flipping through pages of such tried-and-true knowledge, the reader is left with a sense of empowerment to accomplish what might once have seemed impossible.